“Yeah, they sound pretty junky.”  Not the thing you want to hear from your doctor while he’s pressing a stethoscope against your back but what I expected to hear from the time I woke up seven hours earlier. It would be “official” when the x-ray results showed what looked like the course diagram of a nine hole golf course where my right lower lung should be but I was pretty sure I had pneumonia when I coughed myself awake around 4 Monday morning.

I’d been moving slower than usual and had a little cough for a couple days before but I hadn’t considered that I was actually any sicker than usual. If it wasn’t for the fever, chills, dizziness, shortness of breath, and inability to get out of bed without falling over I might have thought I was overreacting when I said to myself, “Self, this ain’t no man flu. You got pneumania. You should call someone,” in between gasps.

Yes, pneumania is a real thing. It’s just like the pneumonia that non-men get only it’s real. It’s not the “cough, cough, oh I feel so bad I think I have pneumonia but I’ll still make breakfast and pack everybody’s lunch then go to work and come home and still clean the house before I make a gourmet dinner then I’ll work on my hand crafted head bands for my Etsy shop and write 3 or 4 thousand words for my novel” type of pneumonia. No. What I have is a real pneumonia. A man’s pneumonia. Pneumania!

Ok, it’s true. You can get a little loopy from too much cough syrup. But hey, I got photograph proof that my life is in jeopardy. And not just from your lack of compassion. So there! 😛

Hmm. That might mean more if I didn’t live alone.

Cough, cough.

Sorry.

Cough.